“May I borrow a pen?”
“A what?”
“A pen.”
“You mean a pen.”
“Yes, a pen. To write with.”
“You mean, with which to write?”
“Yes, or a pencil.”
“It’s not a pin. It’s a pen. P-E-N.”
“What?”
“You don’t say P-E-N, pin.”
“Well, you know what I mean, right?”
“I don’t have a pin.”
“… that’s just how I say it.”
It was the first time someone tried to standardize my language. It was the first time someone tried to make me feel stupid for my
colloquial dialect. It was the first time that my Cumberland-Appalachian/SouthernRegionalized English was pointed out as being different from Standard American English as if this were a
significant, bad, or intellectually inferior thing.
I was confused. This had never been a problem before. I
was smart. I had won spelling bees. I read voraciously (like… for fun… on the
bus on the way home up my little back-woodsy mountain… when I finished my
homework… over summers and holidays). And my vocabulary was so precociously developed that I had trouble maintaining normal adolescent relationships, damn
it! So, as a freshman in my English Composition class at my moderately
progressive Tennessee high school, I truly believed that this classroom, like
others, was the land of my Mother Tongue. It isn’t cool to use the word “voraciously”
as a fifteen year-old hanging out with your friends—it’s supposed to be very
cool to do that in an English class!
Insert my hick accent, y’all. Let the judgments fly.
Grammar Rules Behind 3 Commonly Disparaged Dialects:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/51741/grammar-rules-behind-3-commonly-disparaged-dialects
Grammar Rules Behind 3 Commonly Disparaged Dialects:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/51741/grammar-rules-behind-3-commonly-disparaged-dialects
See, what I did not know
(oh, but what I have learned!) is that Southern=Stupid to the “educated ear.”
And my teacher (little did I know) was hearing something in my voice that
masked any intellectual potential I may have had. She was from “the North,” the
land where they don’t fry things and they don’t “talk funny like us” (the same land where I knew Good Witches came from, too, I might add, but was "No Place Like Home"). What I
did not realize at the time was that her “correction” was a genuine attempt to
help me remove what would be a very stigmatizing identifier from my
pronunciation. She was not an unkind person, and I believe she ultimately knew
that institutions—institutions that have been the bedrock of my career—are not
particularly kind to an incursive ‘r’ or a rolling drawl. But did I resent the
unnecessary correction? Yep. It liketa killt me.
It wasn't until much later when I left the land of colloquial homogeneity and found myself surrounded by difference of many kinds--this time, diversity--that I realized what my attempted re-education had been all about. As an adult student, traveler, professional, and educator, I have more frequently found myself being different in the presence of difference. Diversity is a tricky concept, right? Cultural, sexual, political, neurobiological, economical, situational, experiental, emotional, racial, linguistic, age-relational, spiritual, ideological, intangible... diversity is not something easily encapsulated in an institutional statement. Representing and identifying our "selves" amid the masses (perhaps particularly within an institutionalized mass) can present a challenge to the lone, wavering voice, even if that voice finds itself reified by a specific demographic grouping. Diversity by its very definition should resist reductivism and stereotyping at the expense of the personal--but that is a lot to ask of an educational system for many reasons, not all of them easy to locate. What we do see so frequently represented in American educational institutions, though (even democratic ones with "diversity missions") is tension--the tension between the individual and the group, difference and the ideated norm. Perhaps nowhere is this battle more hard fought than on paper and on the tongue. My little story of colloquial standardization reflects what is, of course, a much larger debate in language and composition pedagogy--do we standardize them or do we diversify?
To explore this question a bit further, I would like to briefly consider Christopher Schroeder's Diverse by Design: Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions (2011). Schroeder's ethnographic exploration of Northeastern Illinois University's (NEIU) ecology as "the ostensibly most (ethnically) diverse university in the Midwest" (p. 2) presents us with refreshingly few closed-ended answers, and rewardingly several fractured and uncertain views of authentic and often contradictory findings. Schroeder's focus is primarily on NEIU's identity as a Hispanic-Serving Institution and the programatic and individual-level challenges, successes, and questions this framework of diversity-as-identity poses for teachers, students, and university. More specifically, Schroeder looks at the way in which language acts as a point of negotiation, resistance, acceptance, transmission, unification... and, perhaps in some small way, standardization, of identity.
At the heart of Schroeder's discussion, however, exists a core thesis: "Diversity, despite what we say, disturbs us" (p. 3). Schroeder, like many others, spends the following chapters parsing possible definitions for "diversity," "we/us," and, maybe most importantly, "disturbs." For it is our disturbance that seems to drive us to push for institutional change, to invest in paradigms of standardization, to privilege SAE as more normal than Emerging-Hispanic-English or AAVE, or to deny 9th Grade girls who "talk with a twang" pens.
Diversity IS disturbing. So is standardization. I don't think it all has to be bad--we can learn from each positionality. But I think as educators, in particular, we must take responsibility for the disturbances we enact when we impose/require standardized language practices and expectations upon large groups. This is bound to disturb our students as much as we have been disturbed by their increasing need for new ways of teaching. Institutionally, the move toward "diversity" (however we define it) has been hard for us--it was hard for my well-intended teacher, and it is hard for so many institutions who are faced with unprecedentedly unique student groups now. By the same token, standardization of thought and performance is hard for students--why should that shift toward something not like them be easy, and why should we expect it to be? (And is it best or good? This MUST be asked.) Change is always hard. With patience, though, I think we can find solutions: accents have a tendency to become less different over time as imperfection gives way to intent... we might just need to start listening differently.
To learn more about Hispanic-Serving Institutions:
http://www.hacu.net/assnfe/companydirectory.asp?STYLE=2&COMPANY_TYPE=1,5
To learn some Southern Appalachian English:
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/dictionary.html
We're all in this together,
Rachael
To explore this question a bit further, I would like to briefly consider Christopher Schroeder's Diverse by Design: Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions (2011). Schroeder's ethnographic exploration of Northeastern Illinois University's (NEIU) ecology as "the ostensibly most (ethnically) diverse university in the Midwest" (p. 2) presents us with refreshingly few closed-ended answers, and rewardingly several fractured and uncertain views of authentic and often contradictory findings. Schroeder's focus is primarily on NEIU's identity as a Hispanic-Serving Institution and the programatic and individual-level challenges, successes, and questions this framework of diversity-as-identity poses for teachers, students, and university. More specifically, Schroeder looks at the way in which language acts as a point of negotiation, resistance, acceptance, transmission, unification... and, perhaps in some small way, standardization, of identity.
At the heart of Schroeder's discussion, however, exists a core thesis: "Diversity, despite what we say, disturbs us" (p. 3). Schroeder, like many others, spends the following chapters parsing possible definitions for "diversity," "we/us," and, maybe most importantly, "disturbs." For it is our disturbance that seems to drive us to push for institutional change, to invest in paradigms of standardization, to privilege SAE as more normal than Emerging-Hispanic-English or AAVE, or to deny 9th Grade girls who "talk with a twang" pens.
Diversity IS disturbing. So is standardization. I don't think it all has to be bad--we can learn from each positionality. But I think as educators, in particular, we must take responsibility for the disturbances we enact when we impose/require standardized language practices and expectations upon large groups. This is bound to disturb our students as much as we have been disturbed by their increasing need for new ways of teaching. Institutionally, the move toward "diversity" (however we define it) has been hard for us--it was hard for my well-intended teacher, and it is hard for so many institutions who are faced with unprecedentedly unique student groups now. By the same token, standardization of thought and performance is hard for students--why should that shift toward something not like them be easy, and why should we expect it to be? (And is it best or good? This MUST be asked.) Change is always hard. With patience, though, I think we can find solutions: accents have a tendency to become less different over time as imperfection gives way to intent... we might just need to start listening differently.
To learn more about Hispanic-Serving Institutions:
http://www.hacu.net/assnfe/companydirectory.asp?STYLE=2&COMPANY_TYPE=1,5
To learn some Southern Appalachian English:
http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/dictionary.html
We're all in this together,
Rachael
Nothing wrong with a Southern drawl. Hope you never lose it or become ashamed of it. Love your blog. Read every word.
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading, and thank you for your encouragement!
ReplyDelete